licenses, and the fax requesting – practically ordering – her presence in Gordi. The soldier took the fax and frowned as he tried to read it, getting it thoroughly wet. He stepped back to consult with an officer squatting in the rear hatch of the nearest carrier.
‘They do not want to be here,’ Lado muttered to Kaye. ‘And we do not want them. But we asked for their help … Who do we blame?’
The rain stopped. Kaye stared into the misting gloom ahead. She heard crickets and birdsong above the engine whine.
‘Go down, go left,’ the soldier told Lado, proud of his English. He smiled for Kaye’s benefit and waved them on to another soldier standing like a fence post in the gray gloom beside the ditch. Lado engaged the clutch and the little car bucked around the ditch, past the third peacekeeper, and onto the side road.
Lado opened the window all the way. Cool moist evening air swirled through the car, lifted the short hair over Kaye’s neck. The roadsides were covered with tight-packed birch. Briefly the air smelled foul. They were near people. Then Kaye thought maybe it was not the town’s sewage that smelled so. Her nose wrinkled and her stomach knotted. But that was not likely. Their destination was a mile or so outside the town, and Gordi was still at least two miles off the highway.
Lado came to a streamlet and slowly forded the quick-rushing shallow water. The wheels sank to their hubcaps, but the car emerged safely and continued on for another hundred meters. Stars peeked through swift-gliding clouds. Mountains drew jagged dark blanks against the sky. The forest came up and fell back and then they saw Gordi, stone buildings, some newer two-story square wooden houses with tiny windows, a single concrete municipal cube without decoration, roads of rutted asphalt and old cobble. No lights. Black, sightless windows. The electricity was out again.
‘I don’t know this town,’ Lado muttered. He slammed on the brakes, jolting Kaye from a reverie. The car idled noisily in the small town square, surrounded by two-story buildings. Kaye could make out a faded Intourist sign over an inn named the Rustaveli Tiger.
Lado switched on the tiny overhead light and pulled out the faxed map. He flung the map aside in disgust and heaved open the Fiat’s door. The hinges made a loud metal groan. He leaned out and yelled in Georgian, ‘Where is the grave?’
Darkness was its own excuse.
‘Beautiful,’ Lado said. He slammed the door twice to make it catch. Kaye pressed her lips together firmly as the car lurched forward. They descended with a high-pitched gnash of gears through a small street of shops, dark and shuttered with corrugated steel, and out the backside of the village, past two abandoned shacks, heaps of gravel and scattered bales of straw.
After a few minutes, they spotted lights and the glow of torches and a single small campfire, then heard the racketing burr of a portable generator and voices loud in the hollow of the night.
The grave was closer than the map had showed, less than a mile from the town. She wondered if the villagers had heard the screams, or indeed if there had been any screams. The fun was over.
The UN team wore gas masks equipped with industrial aerosol filters. Nervous Georgian Republic Security soldiers had to resort to bandannas tied around their faces. They looked sinister, comically so under the circumstances. Their officers wore white cloth surgical masks.
The head of the sakrebulo, the local council, a short big-fisted man with a tall shock of wiry black hair and a prominent nose, stood with a doggishly unhappy face beside the security officers.
The UN team leader, a US army colonel from South Carolina named Nicholas Beck, made quick introductions and passed Kaye one of the UN masks. She felt self-conscious but put it on. Beck’s aide, a black female corporal named Hunter, passed her a pair of white latex surgical gloves. They gave familiar slaps against her wrists as she put them on.
Beck and Hunter led Kaye and Lado away from the campfire and the white jeeps down a small path through ragged forest and scrub to the graves.
‘The council chief out there has his enemies. Some locals from the opposition dug the trenches and then called UN headquarters in Tbilisi,’ Beck told her. ‘I don’t think the Republic Security folks want us here. We can’t get any cooperation in Tbilisi. On short notice, you were the only one we could find with any expertise.’
Three parallel trenches had been re-opened and marked by electric lights on tall poles, staked into the sandy soil and powered by a portable generator. Between the stakes lengths of red and yellow plastic tape hung lifeless in the still air.
Kaye walked around the first trench and lifted her mask. Wrinkling her nose in anticipation, she sniffed. There was no distinct smell other than dirt and mud.
‘They’re more than two years old,’ she said. She gave Beck the mask. Lado stopped about ten paces behind them, reluctant to go near the graves.
‘We need to be sure of that,’ Beck said.
Kaye walked to the second trench, stooped, and played the beam of her flashlight over the heaps of fabric and dark bones and dry dirt. The soil was sandy and dry, possibly part of the bed of an old melt stream from the mountains. The bodies were almost unrecognizable, pale brown bone encrusted with dirt, wrinkled brown and black flesh. Clothing had faded to the color of the soil, but these patches and shreds were not army uniforms: they were dresses, pants, coats. Woolens and cottons had not completely decayed. Kaye looked for synthetics; they could establish a maximum age for the grave. She could not immediately see any.
She moved the beam up to the walls of the trench. The thickest roots visible, cut through by spades, were about half an inch in diameter. The nearest trees stood like tall thin ghosts ten yards away.
A middle-aged Republic Security officer with the formidable name of Vakhtang Chikurishivili, handsome in a burly way, with heavy shoulders and a thick, often-broken nose, stepped forward. He was not wearing a mask. He held up something dark. It took Kaye a few seconds to recognize it as a boot. Chikurishivili addressed Lado in consonant-laden Georgian.
‘He says the shoes are old,’ Lado translated. ‘He says these people died fifty years ago. Maybe more.’
Chikurishivili angrily swung his arm around and shot a quick stream of words, mixed Georgian and Russian, at Lado and Beck.
Lado translated. ‘He says the Georgians who dug this up are stupid. This is not for the UN. This was from long before the civil war. He says these are not Ossetians.’
‘Who mentioned Ossetians?’ Beck asked dryly.
Kaye examined the boot. It had a thick leather sole and leather uppers, and its hanging strings were rotted and encrusted with powdery clods. The leather was hard as a rock. She peered into the interior. Dirt, but no socks or tissue – the boot had not been pulled from a decayed foot. Chikurishivili met her querulous look defiantly, then whipped out a match and lit up a cigarette.
Staged, Kaye thought. She remembered the classes she had taken in the Bronx, classes that had eventually driven her from criminal medicine. The field visits to real homicide scenes. The putrescence protection masks.
Beck spoke to the officer soothingly in broken Georgian and better Russian. Lado gently re-translated his attempts. Beck then took Kaye’s elbow and moved her to a long canvas canopy that had been erected a few yards from the trenches. Under the canopy, two battered folding card tables supported pieces of bodies. Completely amateur, Kaye thought. Perhaps the enemies of the head of the sakrebulo had laid out the bodies and taken pictures to
